East Village Writer’s Bloc

Leading up to the early ’90s, a matter of years before Mayor Giuliani turned Manhattan into McHattan, the East Village still served as a Bohemian Mecca for artists, poets, musicians and writers. But not long after, things started to change. East Village Writer’s Bloc was written at the end of this era.

Arthur Nersesian’s 1993 play not only tells the story of six artists that could just as easily live in Brooklyn today, but it also serves as testament to the wider emergence of gay and women’s rights, the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, and the naïveté of a time when people still hadn’t upgraded from five-inch floppy disks for their desktop computers. Paul Mazza directs.

Located in a basement apartment somewhere around Avenue C, the characters who comprise a writers’ support group — the East Village Writer’s Bloc — meet every week to read their latest works. Reggie is a onetime screenwriter who saw his friends experience success while he became the superintendent of the apartment building where he now hosts the group. He lives with his girlfriend, Lucy, who was an active participant in the group until she grew despondent from lack of praise. Samantha, Lucy’s foil, continues to attend the group and regale her friends with moral tales about women’s rights rife with Kafka-esque allegories, in the process, garnering little praise herself. Her main adversaries amongst the group are her onetime lover, Miles (who has recently become a cop), and their friend Waldo, who hasn’t brought anything new to the group for too long. Along with Lenny, whose graphically-lewd poems and gay-themed limericks amuse, arouse and appall the group, the writers pick on each other’s weaknesses incessantly until they fall into the greater good inside each of them.